Sun, 30 Mar 2008

What do you think about the Electoral College?

What was the most outrageous thing about the election of 2000? You might think it was the conduct of Florida's election, or the way the Supreme Court ruled that counting votes wasn't as important as preserving George Bush's presumption of victory. I think it was the fact that the loser got half a million more votes than the winner. Is this how we want to run a democracy?

As most of us realized in 2000, we don't have a national election for president. We have 50 elections to choose "electors" who go off and meet as the Electoral College and choose the president. The College is one of those undemocratic vestiges of a time when the founding fathers were willing to endorse democracy in principle, but not so much in practice. This year, there's a bill in 44 state legislatures, including ours, that could spell the end of the Electoral College. It has an uphill battle here, though, and needs your support to get through the Assembly.

The College is a relic of the bargain made in Philadelphia to persuade reluctant states to join the union. One aspect of the bargain gives all the states two more electoral votes than they'd have if they were apportioned by population alone. For big states, this hardly matters, while for small states, it's an important addition. Rhode Island gets four electoral votes, giving us three-quarters of a percent of the electoral votes with only a third of a percent of the nation's population.

This sounds like a good bargain for us, but in the collection of small states, Rhode Island has been outnumbered for a long time. The year 1876 was the last time the Electoral College overturned the popular vot. That year, the outsize electoral votes of the former slave states produced an election deadlock. The bargain that broke the deadlock spelled the end of Reconstruction, allowing the Ku Klux Klan and its allies to come out from the shadows and take over southern government. The result was poll taxes, land restrictions and the rest of the Jim Crow laws that took another four score and nine years to overcome.

In 2000, the Electoral College again took the election away from the winner of the popular vote, and this time it was clear that the collection of "small" states is dominated by the red states of the west. For every Rhode Island in the east, there's an Idaho, and a Wyoming in the west. For every Vermont, a pair of Dakotas.

So how do we get rid of this relic? It's not going to be via a consitutional amendment, which requires three-fourths of the states to approve it. Flawed as it is, the current system is the source of power for the people and states who have it now. No matter how undemocratic the current system, reform asks them to give up power. Why would they want that?

A group of activists have found a way to thread this needle. They've been pushing a plan for a state's compact to defang the College. Under their plan, states would agree to award their electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote. The compact won't take effect until states with a majority of electoral votes agree, but if you think about it for a minute, you'll see that's all it will take to make it work. This is a considerably lower hurdle than a constitutional amendment. The Governors of New Jersey and Maryland have already signed this compact, and the bill has passed at least one house of the legislature in seven other states. (There's more at nationalpopularvote.com.)

Besides being a weird way to elect a president, what many people don't realize is that the Electoral College is also a hodge-podge. The rules for selecting electors vary from state to state, as they have from the very beginning. Most states award all their electoral votes to the winner of the vote in their state, but not all. Maine and Nebraska apportion the votes according to who won each congressional district, with a bonus two votes for the overall winner.

In 1796, Virginia split its electoral votes between Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, who carried the entire state of Massachusetts. After that, Virginia changed its rules to winner-take-all to help Thomas Jefferson win the presidency. In a vain attempt to protect John Adams, Massachusetts changed theirs, too. In other words, there's nothing sacred about how electors are awarded; both Article II of the Constitution and our history say so.

So let's do away with this relic. Again, the compact wouldn't take effect until 270 electoral votes' worth of states agree to it. Voting for the compact means voting to abolish the Electoral College, not voting to give away some power we don't really have. If anything, we'll get more attention from Presidential campaigns than in the past, since every vote here will count.

A bill to join the compact was heard in the House Judiciary committee last week. At the moment, it appears the bill is going to be bottled up in that committee, though it may have a better chance in the Senate. If you care about how we elect presidents, check rilin.state.ri.us/CommitteeMembers and see if your representative or senator is on the Judiciary Committee and tell them you want this bill to come to a vote. Call them. Don Lally (D-Narragansett, NK, SK) is the committee chair, and could use a call, too.

[Updated: corrected description of Maine and Nebraska's apportionment methods.]

23:00 - 30 Mar 2008 [/y8/cols] link

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